​Blog!Strike! News and Gaming Thoughts﻿﻿

I've been thinking a lot about inclusiveness when putting together Strike! It's important to me to make a game that everyone feels welcome to play. I wanted to share with you some of the things I've done to that end, and I hope to hear from you in the community about ways I could do even more.

On page one, I have included the following note: "It should go without saying that your character can be of any culture or creed, any gender, and have any sexual identity you like, regardless of the setting, genre or tone. Even in realistic historical games, history tells us that there were people from distant lands traveling the world, there were people who did not fit the common ideas of the time, and there were people who defied both rules and expectations. Your character can be any or even all of those"

First, let's talk about gender. In the art, I am requiring that fully half of the characters will be female and half male. A few of the characters will look androgynous, as well. In my examples in the text, about half of the names I use will read as female. Half of the characters in the adventures are women, and the women occupy roles just as important as the men. I've found this to be very easy to do - it's not hard to use one name over another, and the characters that seem fun or cool as men seem equally fun and cool as women.

When discussing hypothetical characters or players of unspecified gender, I use the pronoun "they" as a singular instead of the clunkier "he or she," except where it would cause confusion. Whatever the opinion of grammar prescriptivists, the "singular they" is something nearly everyone uses at times without even thinking about it these days, so I don't feel that my usage is at all controversial.

None of the characters in the art will be sexualized. If you want fantasy pinups, there are plenty of other games and places you can go to find that.

Dealing with sexual preference is trickier simply because Strike barely touches on sexuality at all. If we reach our $10 000 stretch goal and I flesh out the setting of the Last Aeon, you will find that some of the major faction leaders in the setting (the icons) are in same-sex relationships. I am asking a friend of mine who is a trans woman for advice on the best way to include a major character who is explicitly transgender without making that the focus of the character. I'm not ashamed to admit that I would like more advice making the rules text and examples inclusive with regards to gay or trans issues.

Next up, I'd like to talk about race. Again, I've given my artists instructions that the art should include men and women with a variety of features and skin tones. At the same time, I want to avoid tokenism: I won't ever say "oh, but we already drew a black person, so we don't need another."

Using the word "race" to refer to things like goblins has always seemed a little bit off-the-mark. In the section on Origins, I have the following statement:"If you want to use these mechanics, you should decide whether the “races” in your game represent different species or if they represent different cultures or subcultures. Both are appropriate and you can even mix and match. The word “race” doesn’t refer to either of these ideas though, so I’m going to give them the generic label of Origin. You decide what to call it in your game: species, culture, model number, phenotype, whatever."

Strike aims to be inclusive to players of all different sizes, all different ages, disabled and able, deaf and hearing. The characters I write will represent this, as will the characters in the art. One of the pregenerated player characters in the Sci-Fi adventure is Deaf. Yuri recently drew this fantastic old woman roboticist with her killer robot pal:

When I think back to the books I read in high school and before, the fat characters that spring to mind are the Baron Harkonnen and Ignatius J Reilly, along with some evil old aunts or stepmothers. Hardly an inspiring bunch. When I read Gardens of the Moon, I was impressed by Tattersail as a type of character I hadn't seen before: she is explicitly described as fat, but she is good and powerful and respected and other characters regard her as attractive. We need more Tattersails! Terry Pratchett wrote several books where the protagonists were a couple of grumpy old women, not to mention all his work taking on racism and sexism through his fiction. We need more Granny Weatherwaxes and Nanny Oggs! Again, writing the Last Aeon would be a chance for me to try to live up to my heroes and write such great characters in powerful positions in the world.

I'm sure that there is much more that I could do that I've never thought about. How could I make you feel included? Let me know!

Please share, discuss and comment on this post. I have more to learn, and I hope that this post will both help others make more inclusive games and attract comments from people who can help me make Strike more inclusive, too.

Love this! Old Lady Mad Scientist is the sort of idea I'd never consider otherwise. This shows that inclusivity is a positive force that encourages creativity, rather than suppressing it. Also funny how spell check says "inclusivity" is not a word, and recommends "exclusivity." Oh boy.

Reply

Jack Dandy

2/24/2015 11:13:10 pm

I personally think this entire "trying to make people feel included" is silly- and I know a bunch of gay people who think the same way.
I mean, if somebody came up to me and said "I don't feel like this RPG is for me because they don't explicitly say I'm allowed to be gay", it would seem to me that the person is being petty. After all: RPGs are fueled by imaginations!
Why would anybody think you need "authorization" by the game's writer to be whatever you want to be?
Did any of the classic RPGs outright say "You're NOT ALLOWED TO BE GAY\TRANS\DOLPHIN" ?

Ahhh, but, I digress. The game still sounds great to me, and I can't wait to get my hands on the final product. (I soooo hope you reach the 9K goal! The adversarial mode + extra character options is what I want to see!)

P.S: Can't wait to run a super-sexist game in Hyboria. ;)

Reply

Jim (not McGarva)

2/25/2015 02:00:35 am

You and your bunch of gay friends are apparently unaware of sex-based characteristic limitations in classic games of heroic fantasy, the jaw-dropping sexism in fantasy/sci-fi art, and the disproportionate number of white people portrayed in that art. If it's petty to be affected by that -- if it's so unreasonable to imagine that going out of your way to be inclusive makes a difference -- why are the heroes of so many fantasy, sci fi, and comic books white men? Why are the female characters still posed differently than the male ones on the covers? What % of these characters are gay or trans, when all that was limiting the creators was their imagination?

Reply

Jack Dandy

2/25/2015 03:25:17 am

It's just art. Me and my friends never looked at the pictures in the books and said "We can only be these things".
That's ridiculous.

And as for all your "why" questions- They were simply trends in fantasy art. No more, no less. Only weak minded people would attribute so much power to them.

Steven D Warble

2/26/2015 02:29:57 am

"why are the heroes of so many fantasy, sci fi, and comic books white men?" Because they were written/drawn by predominately while male writers/artists for a white male audience living in a white male dominated world. And I agree that it is a good thing to see that narrow range expanded, and more peoples included in the party.

dwarf74

2/25/2015 03:31:35 am

So what's the actual objection then? If you don't think you need authorization, that's fine, but I don't see how you're harmed by the author giving it anyway?

Reply

Jack Dandy

2/25/2015 03:34:36 am

Oh, I'm in no way harmed! I was simply wondering about it is all. I realize that on the internet, it's sometimes hard to discern a person's intentions. But be assured I was asking out of curiosity only.

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Author

Jim McGarva is married to an awesome (and very patient) wife, and a father to three awesome (and not so patient) young girls. He is a math instructor who loves to play and create games.